


Tempo

by foxdreams



Series: Tempo // Movement [1]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Aggressive piano playing, Alternate Universe - High School, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coming Out, Friends to Lovers, Love Confessions, M/M, More like melancholy with a happy ending, Pining Riku (Kingdom Hearts), Playing fast and loose with music theory, Requited Love, Slow Burn, Soriku - Freeform, VERY fast and VERY loose, mostly riku, oblivious idiots being oblivious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 14:18:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18662101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxdreams/pseuds/foxdreams
Summary: Sometimes, Riku thought he could measure out his entire life between the bars of a song, everything divided neatly up into measures and periods; questions and answers.Then Sora showed up.(The HS pianist!Riku and dancer!Sora au you didn't know you wanted)





	Tempo

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by @hearts_in_tune on twitter, who uttered the words "What if Riku learned to play piano so he could recreate the sound of dearly beloved?", which then gripped me by the throat and shook until I wrote this entire fic, which then spiraled completely out of control and into an 11k monster.
> 
> It's also my first fic, so I hope you enjoy :)
> 
> There's also a playlist I did for this fic with lots of piano, if you want to follow along: https://open.spotify.com/user/foxdreams/playlist/7ehCIyamDuTTdSmqogd2cN?si=OB5A5F4xQMSKxR4sQx_CcQ

Sometimes, Riku thought he could measure out his entire life between the bars of a song, everything divided neatly up into _measures_ and _periods_ ; questions and answers.

 _Larghissimo_ : That was how it was, growing up Riku. A quiet, stoic child that nobody really knew what to do with, he was content to stay inside for hours, staring at the walls before he’d known where the time went. Absent parents and a kind but distant nanny meant he was left to his own devices more of the time than was probably healthy, and his house was massive and emptier for all the space. Predictably, he spent almost all his time in the library, absorbing anything he could possibly get his hands on, would sometimes hide there and not be found until nightfall, when he couldn’t see the words anymore because he couldn’t reach the lights.

He remembered lying in bed, watching the sun slide through the gaps in the blinds, shadows lengthening over him as his mind was a thousand years away, watching something entirely different. Remembered watching as the stars slowly blinked to life and he blinked out.

Stories were what he was imaging in his mind: fantastical tales of lost princesses, forgotten memories and the heros that would save them and right them all. School, responsibility, loving parents, friends—they didn’t matter, when he was daydreaming. They gripped him, held his heart and _squeezed_ and pressured and built up in him like a swirling hurricane until he found some way to let them all out.

What he couldn’t seem to find in friends, he made up for in imagination, and that was okay even if nobody actually wanted to hear him talk about it. He kept to himself, tried drawings in crayons that went nowhere and thought more about that than school.

Riku was always alone, wrapped up and insulated in his stories, until he met Sora.

 

—————-

 

 _Adagio_ : That was how it was when Sora found him.

As much as Riku was content to sit and ruminate until he grew roots, Sora was never, ever still.

There were monkey bars involved, he remembered that much, but the edges around the memory were fuzzy, now—worn and faded like river stones from how much he had turned it over in his mind.

They must have been 6 or so, based on the school and the year—Sora was a year younger than him, but the Destiny Islands elementary school shared the same recess grounds between all the grades.

Riku had been in the sandbox, that much he remembered, and he was alone, of course, because he always was. A pair of red sneakers had materialized in front of him because _something_ had just leapt from the monkey bars and crushed his sand castle with abandon, which made him very mad because he was in the middle of carefully, meticulously adding the leafy flags to the parapets.

The pair of sneakers said, “Hey, whacha doing?”

Riku frowned. “You ruined my castle.” He left out the fact that a prince had been living in that castle and he was about to leave to fight the dragon he had yet to build in the grass outside the sandbox, because it was none of this kid’s business. 

The pair of sneakers bent down to look at the damage he’d caused, and Riku finally saw that he was, in fact, a boy with red sneakers, black shorts, a yellow star t-shirt, a spray of freckles, and wild brown hair growing in every direction there was to grow.

“Oops. I do that a lot.”

Riku glanced at him sidelong, but was still angry. “Destroy castles?”

The boy rubbed his nose. “Yeah. Mom says I’m a _menace_.”

Riku squinted at him. “What does that mean?” He made a mental note to check the dictionary later.

“I dunno,” shrugged yellow t-shirt, who then planted himself in the sand next to Riku. The boy had a bright yellow bandaid on his cheek, and it looked fluorescent against his brown skin and ocean-blue eyes.

“I’m Sora,” he told him, grinning wide and easy, like he didn’t care that Riku was still mad. “What if I help you make a better one?”

They made a better one, together—it was twice the size and the parapets gained wreaths of daisy chains because Sora was _really good_ at finding the best ones. He told Sora the story, reluctantly, because he had to describe what the dragon looked like as Sora built it out of rocks and leaves as Riku supervised, tongue poking out the side of his mouth in concentration.

Riku wasn’t angry anymore.

 

—————-

 

 _Andante_ was the way Sora inserted himself into his life, and soon after it was like he’d always been there.

He was so _good_ at that: making himself a home in inhospitable conditions. Especially good at ignoring all of Riku’s bad moods and quirks and things that adults called _difficult_ —not in a willful way, just in a _Sora_ way, which was warm and felt like the sun and made him wonder if he really was all that bad.

Sora was the first one to call them best friends, a few weeks into their budding friendship. Riku, who had never had a friend before, had no idea if it was true.

For his part, Riku was pretty unsure of what they were, just that soon after the castle incident Sora was finding him on the playground, and finding him at lunch, and walking him home at night, and soon the whole thing had escalated before Riku really had time to figure out how he felt. Crowded was what he expected to feel, all his alone time now monopolized by a force of nature of a child who got into everything and couldn’t sit still for a single moment. What he actually felt was...something else.

The best thing about Sora was his constant, unstoppable movement. The boy was always fidgeting in some way, tapping a pencil in rhythm against the deck or tapping his feet to sounds only he could hear or playing with the cords on his hoodie or his shoelaces or even Riku’s fraying uniform sleeves, if they were within reach of his wandering hands. It was clear, when you watched him, that his was a body not meant to stay grounded, like he had learned to dance while everyone else had learned to walk.

They were so _different_ , and that’s what made them so compatible, in so many ways.

The months turned into semesters and sleepovers and summer camp trips, and they became inseparable, Riku-and-Sora, a united front. The emptiness of his house felt a little lighter when Sora was there, projecting light at everything he saw.

He was content to let Sora run rampant in the library as he read, climbing the shelves and hanging from the doorknobs and checking the cushions under the window nooks for secrets. It wasn’t like the nanny would stop them, and his parents were away on business again, so it served them right. Having the company was...nice.

Adults called Sora _difficult_ , too, just in different words. 

Sora was bright and vivacious and demanded constant vigilance lest he knock over another planter, another desk, another teacher as he careened down the hallways. But Riku heard his mom and her friends (who were not away on business) tossing around words like attention and deficit one day, eating a sandwich at the table over Sora’s house, and what he actually heard was that they maybe thought Sora was _wrong_ , and that made him angry in a different way it was hard to articulate.

It was a matter of time before the adults found some way to try and curtail the glorious, lively soul within Sora. First they tried team sports, but Sora was just too empathetic for heavy competition at that age—he would tackle someone to the ground only to turn around and ask if they were okay, and he would throw track competitions by making sure an opposing teammate that had taken a heavy fall got to finish, his own team forgotten.

When a sullen, exhausted Sora didn’t take to that the way they’d hoped, they took him to talk to people for hours on end that did nothing but send Sora home saying things like he didn’t want to talk about it.

Sora _always_ wanted to talk about things with Riku—he never _stopped_. He’d even started telling Sora some more of his stories, the ones with the extra heroic princes, because Sora liked the ones with lots of action the most. Having an audience made the maelstrom inside him quiet, for a little while.

The shut down, quiet boy was not the one Riku knew.

Really, the dance classes had been a last resort, but in hindsight it should have been the obvious one.

The first class he tried was ballet, then tap soon after, and then, after a few months, modern. He told Riku all about it as he bounced on his bed the next day after school, a rhythmic motion that Riku was following with his eyes from the safe end.

“It’s stories, Riku! You can tell _stories_ with your _body_. How cool is that?”

Riku thought it was actually _really_ cool, but didn’t want to show it. “What kind of stories?”

“Anything you want!” Sora leaned over him, paused in his abuse of the mattress. His mother wouldn’t notice anyway, would just replace it if it got bad enough. He almost wanted Sora to wreck it more, flatten it beyond recognition so she’d have to come home and see it, see _him_.

Riku paused in thought. “Even _Oathkeeper_?”

“Even _Oathkeeper_!” Sora crowed, bouncing more excitedly. Riku was started to be unseated.

 _Oathkeeper_ , their current favorite story, was one they invented about two boys their age who traveled together to various worlds with their friends.

Staring up into his deep blue eyes, Riku felt his stomach suddenly flip over like a fish, and frowned. _What was that?_

“How...how does that work?”

Sora hummed and sat back on his heels, now picking at the abused mattress instead. “Well, you listen to the music, and however it makes you feel is how you dance. They said there’s no _wrong way_ to do it.”

That appealed to Riku, the idea of adults telling Sora he was doing something right, for once. The boy put on a brave face, but he knew it was hard for him, sometimes, when every step he took, every movement he wanted to make was somehow too big and too boisterous and loud to them.

Riku squinted at him through his eyelashes, eyes skirting over the excited line of his face in the afternoon sun. His eyes sparkled when they caught the light. “So, the music tells the story?”

Sora nodded excitedly. “Exactly!”

“Hmm,” said Riku.

The next day, he asked about music classes.

 

—————-

 

 _Vivace_ : The feeling he got the first time he touched a piano.

His parents were perfectly content to enroll him in an after school music program—maybe _too_ content, because that meant less hours of awkward questions from other parents on how their son was doing when they never saw him.

“Oh, fine,” they could say. “Don’t you know, he’s _training_ in _music_ , now? We’re very proud of our little Riku.”

He didn’t have aims of any particular sort when he showed up for his first class, was just intrigued by the concept, in general, more than anything. The idea of finding an outlet for his stories—maladaptive daydreaming, that was what the psychologist said, and Riku knew words like that, now, because he was ‘gifted’ for his age, apparently. That didn’t mean he had to like them, fiercely clung to his stories because something so beautiful couldn’t possibly be _wrong_ . That was how he felt about Sora, too, the way his heart clenched when teachers told Sora he was being _distracting_ for being himself.

They brought him to a massive room with instruments piled up high on the walls, some hanging and some in cases, woodwinds and brass and string instruments all in their places, and they asked him what he wanted to play.

He looked around at all of them, utterly lost on what to pick, when he spotted a chipping black upright piano in one of the corners, old but well cared for, probably just forgotten in favor of cooler, louder instruments befitting kids of his age class.

Carefully, he picked his way over to the instrument, his hand sliding across the top, then the lid, and strangely enough it felt like _home_. The kindly woman supervising was raised the cover for him and exposed the black and ivory keys, polished and shiny. 

Riku’s grandmother had played piano, once, when he was a baby. He only knew about it because they still had her old upright stashed away in the garage, even though nobody spoke about when she played or why she’d stopped, since she was long gone. He’d heard she was pretty good, maybe professional, even, if she’d had the chance.

The sounds were somewhere in his memory, even now, and he reached for them as he reached for the keys.

It wasn’t so much music he produced as dissonant notes, but something in him _moved_ with the sounds his hands were making, like he felt them reaching for the shape of something his mind couldn’t quite put a name to yet. He didn’t have the word for it, but it made him...want to be able to create it, something to match what was there in his heart. 

The kindly older woman smiled at him. “I think we have a winner.”

 

—————-

 

 _Tremelo_ : The feeling of being brave.

He was a little older, a little taller, and a little better at piano. 

Not by much, because he was so in his own head about everything it felt stuffed full of memorizing chords and scales, sometimes, and it was hard to focus on the notes when his heart would speed up and he’d feel so afraid to mess up he’d avoid practicing at all. The joy of playing began to gave way to the dragging weight of putting things into boxes--and Riku’s brain really, really loved that because it stamped out all the _feelings._

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to--it was just that he wanted to be _good_ , and those two things didn’t really go together. The weight of his parents’ expectations had filtered down into a form he could understand and internalize, and it made him terrified of messing up.

It maybe didn’t help that they had dragged his grandmother’s piano out of the garage for him and it felt equally haunted by _her_ , now that he had it in front of him.

It took 2 weeks of Sora’s incessant nagging for him to finally crumble and show him something he was learning. It was an old, stuffy piece his piano teacher had given him, and honestly he hadn’t liked it before he tried to learn it and liked it less now that he’d spent hours failing at it.

Sora sat across from him, legs crossed on the floor and looking like he was trying very hard to sit still because Riku’s hands had been hovering for going on 5 minutes now and it was beginning to get hard to be patient.

His hands finally made their way down, but right before it touched the keys Sora broke.

“Riku!” he exploded. “Just _play_ it already!” His voice was too loud in the empty atrium--it had been a sitting room or something like it, before, all old heavy furniture and uncomfortable couches nobody ever used. His parents had been clearing out the furniture that had been there to make Riku a proper music room, now that they were convinced he’d be _taking this piano thing seriously_. As a result, the room felt weirdly haunted by that things that had used to be there. Now, the tall windows were casting plenty of light into the room, and the dust they could never rid from the house was floating in the beams, which gave it an almost peaceful appearance.

At night, it was creepier--Sora would make Riku hold his hand when he slept over and they had to walk past the shadowed, arched doorway. Riku wouldn’t admit he was just as scared.

Riku flinched like he’d been slapped and let his hands fall. “I don’t think I can.”

Sora huffed immediately and rose in defense of his friend. “Of course you can! You’re Riku!"

He smiled ruefully at the keys, because Sora was always so good at doing that--making you believe something was simple, and easy, if you just made it like that.

“Even when I try to do it, it turns stuffy and--okay. I’ll try and show you.”

Anxiously, he flipped the sheet music on the piano over and started from the beginning, eyes tracking awkwardly from the keys back to the lines, cautious and unsure. The melody came out stilted and too slow, and he wanted to shrink internally with every bar, which in turn made him tense his shoulders and slam the keys too hard instead of _grasping_.

He hadn’t noticed Sora sneak up next to him until his hands came around to still his on the piano, and the song faded out. The younger boy’s hands were smaller than his, and tanned and freckled and they contrasted with Riku’s in many ways, who had what his teacher called _pianist hands_ \--but he liked Sora’s more, because they were always warm, like he had an entire sun stuffed into his body somewhere that Riku couldn’t see.

“It just sounds really _scared_.” Sora’s voice came from beside him on the bench. “Why are you scared, Riku?”

He was scared for reasons he couldn’t articulate, yet. Instead, his guilty eyes flicked over to the music.

Sora’s eyes lit like up, electric and vibrant, like he’d found the answer. “You’re scared of the music, aren’t you?”

Riku’s cheeks puffed in indignation at the idea that he would be scared of _paper_ , but some part of him wondered if he was. “I’m not scared of it!” He protested.

“You are _too_. I know your scared face!” Sora mimicked it, drawing his eyebrows down into a hard line, frowning with such exaggeration that Riku burst out laughing.

“That is not what I look like!” He gasped it out, clutching his stomach and bent over on the bench.

Sora released his face and studied him, his electric eyes seeming to phase out somewhere far away. The afternoon sun on his face was soft and warm like it belonged there, and Riku felt warm too, at the sight of it.

“So don’t look at it. The music.” Sora slid his arms behind his head, utterly satisfied with a job well done, a problem solved.

Riku stared at him. “Don’t look at...the music I’m playing?”

Sora nodded seriously, but slow, like Riku was the dumb one. “Duh. That way you won’t be scared.”

He frowned. “I won’t know what the notes are if I don’t look. It’s a lot to remember and sometimes I can’t get all of it right. My teacher keeps saying it’s because I don’t practice enough.”

Sora made a long, low _hmmm_ sound that Riku already knew to be afraid of.

“I got an idea,” Sora said brightly, and that was frightening because his ideas were always either definitely dangerous or close to it--ideas that made adults really mad.

Before he knew what was happening, Sora was standing behind him, and his world fell to black.

“Can you see?” Sora asked him, his hands clapped tight over Riku’s eyes. They were very warm in the slight cold of the atrium, and despite himself, Riku relaxed under his touch.

It was a little weird, how much Sora was always touching him, because he never really got hugs from his parents--just pats on the head, little gestures they probably thought were enough. But it wasn’t like he wanted Sora to stop, either. It was just...different.

“Yeah,” he responded. “Just a little.” He fought not to shift too much under his hands because he liked them there, liked how his face was warming under them. If he really tried, he could make out the vague shapes of light through Sora’s fingers, but it was nothing defined.

Automatically, his hands were tracing over the keys, adjusting to the feeling of seeing in his mind instead of his eyes.

“That’s okay,” Sora reasoned. “Being a little afraid is better than a lot.”

“It’s like a blindfold,” said Riku. He’d had one on at Sora’s birthday party last week, worn it tied over his face while he whacked a giant meow wow pinata until it spilled rainbow candy all over the floor. Maybe this would be like that, focusing in on one thing he wanted to do while the others fell away.

“Try playing it now,” Sora encouraged, bright and full of belief in him.

“It’s going to be bad,” Riku warned him, hands automatically taking up the position, wrists delicately balanced over the keys, shoulders back, feet on the pedals, just like he’d practiced.

“Bad is better than scared,” Sora told him confidently.

Maybe he was right.

Riku began to play.

 

—————-

 

 _Allegreto_ _:_ The way he felt the first time he saw Sora dance.

They were 13 and 14 and shared _everything_ —clothes, homework, worries.

It was a Sunday afternoon when Sora broached the topic, balancing a pencil between his lips and nose in lieu of doing his math homework. Riku, Who was used to this, was working sensibly at his desk while Sora tried in vain to distract him by making funny faces at the back of his head.

They were in Riku’s bedroom, which had a bigger, softer mattress now, one that Sora was perched on, and a few more pictures of them on the walls. He didn’t need to physically see Sora to picture him, quietly staring at the ceiling like he always did when he was avoiding saying something. He was kicking his legs idly, because Riku could sometimes hear the rhythmic _thunk_ of his feet on the wall.

“I think I’m going to stop dancing.”

Casually said, like it didn’t really matter, like Riku didn’t know he was going to dance 3 times a week and sometimes bugging his mom to take him on the weekends like he was ravenous to absorb everything he could get his hands on because Riku _knew_ Sora was a sponge with things he cared about and that Sora’s mom was struggling to afford it on her single salary but couldn’t deny him anything.

Riku stilled, dropping the pencil, finally, the battle lost. Sora refused to meet his eyes.

“That’s stupid. You love dance.”

Sora made a soft noise in his throat. “Yeah, but it’s kinda...weird, right?”

He almost snapped the pencil from the force of his unconscious grip tightening.

“Who told you that?” Riku knew it was someone else’s idea, because Sora would never have given himself the idea--Sora, who loved movement more than life.

Sora winced, completely caught. Flushed red up to his ears and mumbled something Riku couldn’t catch.

“What?”

“ _Someoftheguysinschool_ ,” he said in a rush, turning to bury his face in Riku’s star patterned duvet, which he had been slowly hoarding into a pile around himself. It make Riku think of a dragon from his old stories, and the mental image made him want to smile.

He went back to his paper and the same question he’d been trying to solve for twenty minutes.

“So what? They’re all idiots. And probably jealous.” Not to mention they said stupid things to Riku too, but he didn’t want to tell Sora about those.

Sora fidgeted, and Riku saw from the corner of his eye. His leg was practically vibrating from the motion. “Yeah, that’s what my mom said too.”

“But?”

“They said it was _weird_ for a guy to dance.”

Riku finally placed his homework down and closed the sheet. He turned in his chair.

“How would they know? _They’ve_ never seen you dance.” There. Watch him try and win against Riku on that one.

Sora’s eyes slid over to him, one eye peeking out from the nest of blankets. His words came out muffled. “Neither have you.”

His heart failed to beat properly a few times, for some reason, but he ignored it.

“So? Show me, and I’ll tell you if it’s stupid, and if it’s not you can ignore them because they’re _obviously_ wrong.”

Sora chewed his lip, considering, a nervous habit that he’d developed recently that Riku couldn’t help but stare at, every time, before he would snap himself out of it after looking too long.

“You’ve seen _me_ play. It’s only fair,” Riku reasoned with him.

Sora extracted himself from the blanket hoard one leg at a time.

“Okay,” He said eventually, rolling out the syllables for miles. “But no making fun of me. Promise me, Riku!”

Riku feigned disappointment. “Not even a little?”

Sora threw a pillow at his head.

 

—————-

 

He led Sora to the atrium, where his grandmother’s piano lay, covered in the center of the room. He’d since learned to enjoy the heaviness of the keys, something was satisfying about it compared to the digital keyboards at his music school.

“What do you want me to play?” Riku asked him, pulling the cover in a practiced motion and dusting off the bench with his hands.

Sora took up position in the emptier half of the room and began stretching, first one leg, then the other, and then a graceful dive to touch his toes. He was already wearing sweatpants with little stars on the hems, had taken to wearing loose clothing in the way an athlete does when they’re always moving and restrictive clothing is just an annoyance. His voice was muffled. “Play whatever you feel like.”

Riku, despite himself, felt very anxious about it for some reason. “I’m still not...great at this. Doing it in front of people. I still miss a lot of notes and I have a hard time remembering the chords, sometimes.”

Sora laughed, looked at him from between his legs, in a twisted triangle shape. “The best part is that I won’t know when you’re messing up, and you won’t know when I’m messing up. Besides, I _already_ know you’re great.”

Riku considered this. It really did seem a fair trade. “...Okay,” he agreed eventually.

He stared at the keys for a long time, summoning the will to begin. Playing in front of his best friend was still harder, somehow, than playing in front of his teachers. Cold panic began to set in, close around his heart and cut off the part that flowed through him when he lost himself in a song, and the first few notes came out shuttered and awkward, which made it worse.

“Hey,” said Sora, from behind him. “Relax, Okay? It’s just me. And...if it’s scary, just close your eyes.”

 _Like a blindfold_ , thought Riku.

He craned his head to face him around the piano, and Sora stood in first position, his feet splayed out, and flashed him a thumbs up.

“What are _you_ going to do?”

“Improvise,” Sora said. “It’s a dance thing where you hear the music and just do whatever feels good. And if it looks really stupid, that’s okay, because it’s what you feel at that moment that’s really important.”

He liked the sound of that. Maybe...his music could be that, too, if he could...stop being scared. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try and do the same thing, then.” And if it was horrible, it was okay, because it was what he _felt_. Sora always gave him the courage to do that. 

Sora grinned at him. “Ready when you are.”

Taking a deep breath, he  felt inside himself for the beginning of a story, for the first tendrils of feeling he wanted to convey, and what came to him was one of longing, and hurt, and absent parents and a loneliness bigger than his age. His fingers flew over the keys by the middle and his eyes slid shut accidentally, like Sora had showed him, playing fast, _affrettando_ and then _prestissimo_ and then, in the middle, _rallentando_ —slow, and forlorn, and dragging. He missed a lot of notes, of course, and the thing was janky and didn’t quite fit together how it should to his ears, but he opened his eyes again when he’d forgotten the fear, and everything slid out of his mind, because Sora was dancing.

He was on tiptoe, stretched gracefully out with arms and leg extended, and he would move like he breathed, fluid and slow and strong, he brought a leg up, higher, and fell back, curling his spine in the opposite direction. His eyes were closed in bliss, or something like it—the expression so peaceful on Sora it was jarring, made something in Riku’s heart skip in a way that wasn’t painful, but weird.

He lept and rolled and did all sorts of motions that Riku was sure would have looked wrong on someone as effortlessly born to movement as Sora, but on him it was _heartbreaking_. He spun out in and out of the beams of light spilling in from the window, and it cut his form into something otherworldly and breathtaking. Riku had forgotten he was playing at all.

He started the story, and, with a final position, arms raised over his head, Sora finished it.

He was sweating, out of breath and obviously panting with the exertion, sinking to lie flat on his back on the polished hardwood, when he looked over to Riku. He was also grinning, his eyes alive and on fire in a way he’d never seen in Sora. It was almost a challenge, like he knew he’d done something weird to Riku’s insides. “Well?”

“They’re _wrong_ ,” he managed, because this throat was closing up, for some reason, at seeing his story reflected back at him in someone else. _You were beautiful,_ he didn’t say.

That was the first time he composed a song.

 

—————-

 

 _Precipitando_ _:_ The way he fell for Sora--slowly, then all at once.

“You’re too good to be cooped up in this stupid room and that shitty music school,” Sora had told him one day, one leg propped up as he lounged in the window seat. The harsh light through his hair made it burn red, a halo around him. “You deserve to be _heard_ , Riku.” 

They were 15 and 16, and Sora had the _bright_ idea to enter him in the talent showcase. More precisely, he entered Riku without him knowing because he was so insistent that Riku finally play in front of an audience, after he had turned down recitals for years out of the sheer anxiety of performing for people he didn’t know.

He’d nearly had a breakdown when Sora had told him, and there may have been a yelling match in the hall that landed them in the counselor's office, but ultimately Sora always won their fights, and Riku demanded he at least help him prepare, since he’d caused the whole _problem_ in the first place.

Sora had agreed to sacrifice one after school session a week, so long as he could practice his dancing while he helped Riku practice piano. He’d taken a break from formal lessons--which Riku thought was incredibly stupid--to pursue sports, like his coaches were pushing him into, but he still so plainly loved it that Riku wondered who the sessions were _really_ for.

They commandeered a music room after school for their purposes, one with a better (baby grand) piano as Riku steadily improved. He would play Chopin now, and Mozart; was even, privately, branching out and writing his own songs, and everyone said he was progressing very quickly--except they didn’t know it was because of Sora, who would encourage him and challenge him through the parts in the score where he would rip his hair out, silver strands tangled around his fingers for days as it became a habit.

Riku would stay up late the night before their Thursday dates (he did _not_ think of them like dates) like a boy possessed, writing and scratching out scores at his desk until the early hours when he would finally succumb to sleep.

He became obsessed with the idea of impressing Sora, making grander and louder music each week to try and get some sort of reaction out of him, trying to top himself each time.

For his part, Sora was equally as excited. He would burst in, bringing the scent of fresh cut grass with him from outside where he’d often be at lacrosse practice, sit next to Riku on the bench close enough to touch shoulders, and ask him what story they were telling today.

It was always collaborative, between them—one would come up with an idea, and the other would finish the thought. Sora had no brain for actual music theory, despite _really_ trying—but he picked up enough to tell Riku when a piece needed something, another harmony here or a note there, and Riku was glad to have his ear, because he knew Sora understood exactly what he wanted. It was like they were in sync--perfectly and incredibly. And if Riku’s traitor heart shot electricity down his spine every time Sora brushed his hand or asked him to guide him to the proper key, he was okay with that price for Sora’s friendship.

As with all good things in Riku’s life, he expected it when it finally ended. He’d known about his parents’ divorce before they did, probably, and, just like that, he felt Sora pulling away before it actually happened.

He stopped answering the phone as much, first. Just a little, not enough to really be a pattern, but _enough_.

Sora started making excuses, missing their Thursdays as other friends and responsibilities and other sports teamed took up residence in his life.

As the other boy branched out, his shadow grew more quiet in the absence of the light. Sora was his best friend, but he was _also_ a force of nature and other people started to realize what he already knew—he attracted them like bees, and Riku quietly watched as they took him away.

Cruelty was not in Sora’s nature, so Riku didn’t hold it against him when he started to miss their practices. He knew Sora was never his to keep, not really. It was more like borrowing his time until he had to return it, but that didn’t make it _hurt_ any less.

Composing became more and more of an outlet for the things swirling inside him that he couldn’t bring to the surface, the tinge of jealousy every time he saw Sora sitting with his Lacrosse team at lunch, head thrown back and laughing at the verge of tears with his new friends. He hands tightened on his tray, and he would itch for a pencil, scratch out notes between the edges of his music sheets and punch through the paper on accident.

He wrote something darker that day, wove a story about longing and betrayal, a melody based on a story where your closest friend held the knife.

He got the news about Sora’s life in pieces, for a while, because he would only see him briefly in snatches in the hallway and errant, spaced out texts that came less and less, and if Riku would keep his phone close by while he practiced, he wouldn’t begrudge himself that. Nobody else even had his number besides Naminé, his piano partner from school, and his parents.

He found out he was dating Kairi through kingstagram, of all things. Couldn’t admit he checked all Sora’s photos, still, like an exercise in self harm, because each one stung somewhere. Saw the caption that said 1 month with a little heart next to the photo.

He went to his after-school piano school that day out of spite and composed the whole thing, school uniform tie viciously tight around his eyes as a makeshift blindfold as it poured out of him into the instrument, hands moving fast and violent and crossing over each other for the leaps, slamming the keys more than playing them, until he was leaned bodily over the instrument and panting and his shoulders tight and sore from the effort of it, trying to extract what was in his heart.

“Riku,” Naminé murmured, next to him on the bench, awe in her tone. He had asked her to listen to his piece for the showcase without explaining what it meant. Only Sora got to know his stories.

“This is breathtaking. _Really_ good. What’s it called?”

“ _Oblivion_ ,” he told her, still breathing too hard. “I just finished it today.”

 He played the showcase, in the end--had to, since he’d invested so much time, even though his hands shook through the whole thing, and he saw Sora in the front row, watched him in unblinking fascinating as his eyes turned dark and guilty and sad because Riku always used music to tell Sora the things he couldn’t say. He might have been crying, face crumpling, by the time the music crescendoed until it broke under its own weight, but Riku had already closed his eyes. He played the whole thing blind, just like he practiced, because he knew Sora could see. 

The audience clapped for him, but it didn’t feel like a victory.

 

—————-

 

 _A Tempo_ : When Sora gave him reason to hope, against all odds.

Seventeen year old Riku was still quiet, stoic, and all the things he was before, except he had learned to live without Sora, and with just one parent, and it might not have looked like surviving, but it was.

He learned things about himself, in the space where Sora had been.

After he had written (and played) nothing but the most heart-wrenching pieces he could find for an entire month following the showcase, Naminé finally asked him who broken his heart so badly.

His hands stilled on the keys--he’d been in the middle of _Lacrimosa,_ which was still one of his few favorite classical pieces to play. 

“Why do you think someone broke my heart?”

“There’s so much pain in these pieces, Riku.” She played with her hands, uncomfortable, because they really never spoke much, outside of discussions of chord progressions. “I just. Thought something may have happened, was all.”

Riku’s hands had fisted in his pants because she was _right_.

It was typical, he thought, that he realized he was in love with Sora after he had already driven him off. He was always late on things that really mattered. 

It wasn’t for a lack of trying on Sora’s part. For weeks after the the showcase, he’d started appearing everywhere Riku tried to be—in between classes he would materialize at his locker with a wave, which Riku would duck away from. After that failed, he tried waiting Riku out in the music room, and barely got through a greeting before he turned on his heel and left him there, door slamming behind him. 

His phone blinked up at him daily with apology texts, so he kept it switched off unless he knew somebody needed him. It wasn’t like anyone else even had his number.

He did more piano classes after school, even took up teaching younger beginners just to give himself something to think about that wasn’t Sora-and-Kairi, which is what his brain had corrected just Sora to, because they were always together, now, and his heart felt black and heavy every time he so much as thought about it.

Sora was a beautiful fire in human form, but Riku was stoic, and headstrong, and determined to ice him out.

It was like he was trying desperately to mend something he’d broken, but Riku wasn’t willing to meet him halfway.

That summer, he agreed to go to a pre-college music program simply to get away from him and the clenching, aching feeling he got every time he saw him and Kairi together, linked arms or linked hands, haunting his favorite ice cream spots or loitering in a group of ten rowdy teenagers outside the diner as he passed in his car, Sora’s guilty eyes following him the entire way.

It was an on-site program on the mainland, and Riku was so desperately and fiercely glad to get away from the closeness of the islands, the intimacy of the bonds he’d had there, that he blossomed. His compositions improved in complexity, moved beyond the strict rigidity he had always struggled with and into something more experimental, more experienced.

Scholarships were being discussed, and his parents were full of nothing but praise for their son, even though they still barely spoke--to each other or to him.

He didn’t heal, per say, but he learned to live with the ache in a way that didn’t kill him every moment, learned to associate the sky at dawn and stargazing and the crash of the ocean with things other than Sora, Sora, Sora. For the first time, he saw the road stretching out ahead of him and wanted it, wanted to overcome this and grow and be something more than he was.

If it wasn’t moving on, it may have been something close. Sora had done it, so why shouldn’t he?

It was 3 am the night before his final audition piece was due when Sora called. Sleeping was still hard for him, even at this age—insomnia would creep in whenever he was remotely stressed, but also when he was inspired, stories spilling out of him onto composition paper before he’d even realized that dawn had broken.

He was at his dorm desk when the phone rang, surrounded by crumpled papers he’d thrown behind him mindlessly in the pursuit of a the piece he’d been working on, destroying, and rewriting without much progress. His laptop glowed faintly in the dark room, a song he'd been working on up on the monitor, and he glared at it like it was responsible for the noise.

His roommate groaned and mumbled something angry about the late hour from the direction of the bunk beds, so Riku shrugged on his jacket and took the phone outside instead.

It was because he was already thinking of Sora, probably, and that he was trying his best to kill the way his heart sped up when he read the caller id that he answered at all.

“Sora?” He said, and his breath ghosted out in the coolness of the night, so different from the constant moisture of the islands. It cleared his head.

“Hey,” responded Sora’s voice through the phone, and sure enough, Riku still knew exactly the cadence of his moods. “Sorry for...calling so late. I didn’t really think you would pick up, after everything.”

“I probably wouldn’t,” he told him honestly. He shoved his hands into his pockets, away from the cold. “But I was awake anyway, so.”

Sora laughed, and it sounded pathetic. “You’re...right, sorry. This was stupid. I’ll just..hang up now—“

“Sora,” Riku interrupted him. He hated that he still knew him so well. “What happened?”

There was a pause on the line as Sora made some pathetic sound between a whimper and a sigh.

“It didn’t work out. You know. With Kairi,” he told him.

Riku wasn’t sure what to say— _sorry? congratulations?_ His heart was doing stupid somersaults in his chest in something like victory, but he was torn in so many different directions at once he just stayed silent for a beat too long, instead. 

“Sorry,” Sora continued. “I know you probably didn’t like her—“

 _Because I like you, idiot,_ Riku thought, despite himself, despite things like moving on and walking away and growing up.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose, underneath the thick glasses he now wore for writing and reading, the evidence of a life spent staring at blank pages.

“What do you need, Sora?” If he sounded exhausted, it was because he was, burdened by the sudden knowledge that he could move ten thousand miles away but Sora’s voice could call him back with a word.

The other side of the line paused, and Riku knew it was because Sora was probably seated the wrong way on his bed because he had never sat the right way on anything in his _life_ , legs up the wall as he cradled the phone. He sniffled, and Riku knew exactly what Sora’s post-crying face looked like, and it crowded in on his mind all at once.

“Can you...play me something? It would make me feel better. Maybe.”

Riku, damn his traitor heart, even after all this time—just like the first time—just could never seem to tell him _no_.

“Right now? Sora, it’s 3 AM.”

The other boy sniffed again. “I know.”

He snuck into the music room that night, tiptoed across campus and forgot about curfew like the lovesick fool he was, forgot about his final project entirely, jimmied the faulty lock on the music hall and took up residence in one of the soundproof rooms. He left the phone on speaker on the piano lid.

He played for Sora all the way through him crying again, apologizing for letting Riku down, and finally through Sora breaking down and telling him he missed him every day and it was tearing him apart to not be able to mend whatever it was that he’d done, and he would try if only Riku would _let him_.

Riku felt like crying himself, because all Sora had done was fall in love with someone else—and that was, really, nobody’s fault, and nothing to apologize for.

It had been quiet for some time when Riku’s hands had finally lifted from the keys—he’d played Sora his favorites, lullabies and arias and church hymns he’d picked up all chained together into something soft and comforting. Sora hadn’t spoken in so long that Riku assumed he’d fallen asleep on the phone—in fact, he was warring with himself to hang up because it was undoubtedly creepy to listen to your best friend’s soft breathing for as long as he was, wishing he was there, _wishing_ he was enfolding him in his arms.

He was stiff, anyway--unfolded from his hunch on the seat and cracked everything in his spine on the way up, still not really used to the entirety of his height. The room had a massive, glass skylight that was excellent on nights like this, where the stars were clear and bright in the sky, so he laid under it, laying the phone down with him, like it was Sora next to him instead of just a voice. He pillowed his arms behind his head and waited. 

“It...didn’t work out with Kairi,” Sora said again, like he was telling Riku a secret from a thousand miles away.

Quietly, he tried to force down the cruel lump in his throat, tried to string together the words Sora needed to hear, despite his heart, which was falling through the floorboards. It hurt no less to hear it a second time.

 “Sometimes...people fall in love but it isn’t enough,” Riku supplied, just as quietly, like he knew anything about relationships when he had only loved Sora forever and his parents weren't exactly good examples.

“I know _that_ . No--It didn’t work out because I _didn’t_ love her, Riku.”

His heart pounded in his ears, and _picissamo_ , loud and anxious and speeding towards some conclusion his mind hadn’t grasped yet. Somewhere, his heart knew where this was heading. He wanted to ask---but he wouldn’t.

“I don’t...think I could love a girl like...that.” He was barely whispering, and Riku knew he was hugging a pillow to himself, so tight the phone was being muffled in the fabric. Probably had his face pressed tight to it, eyes closed in apprehension, wrinkling his face. “I really _tried_ , though.”

It _broke_ something in Riku, sent something clanging down a well in the depths of his heart, the echoes following—the idea of Sora blaming _himself_ for not being able to love someone. Sora, who loved all things with abandon _except_ himself.

Sora swallowed, audible even down the line. “Do you...know what I mean?”

His mind was a million miles away in the stratosphere, amongst the sky above him, watching his body from on high. Through the skylight, he saw that dawn was breaking in the distance, and it painted him gold and orange and red, a sunrise laid out before his idle hands.

“Yeah, Sora. I know.” He let it hang there, the truth heavy between them.

“I don’t know who I am anymore, Riku.”

“It’s okay, Sora,” whispered Riku. His hands tightened on the bottom of his shirt. “I do.”

And then, finally: “I...think you should start dancing again.”

Sora cried again, then, quiet and muffled, but it felt like something between them had been remade.

His final was a disaster, unfinished and imperfect, but he left the room smiling, all the same.

—————-

 

 _Allegro_ : The way that Sora seamlessly appeared in his life again and brought his new friends with him, figured out how to fit himself around Riku’s broken edges, no matter how hard Riku had planned to move on.

He found himself part of a _group_ , now--mostly students from drama club, since Sora had redirected all his energy to pursuing that, and they were too loud and boisterous and Riku had _fun_ , and made _friends_ , despite himself. Even Kairi, who it turned out harbored no hard feelings for either of them and had forged an uneasy truce with Riku over time. 

The way Sora started dancing again, and struggled with feeling left behind as everyone who had been in his classes and didn’t take a years long break from formal training to pursue sports instead excelled. How Riku watched Sora’s body remember how much it loved to _move_ , to tell stories, above all things, and how he stayed late with Sora in the studio, sometimes, watching his own determined face in the mirror as he pushed himself beyond the breaking point and more.

Riku would sit against the cold hardwood, laptop and papers splayed across the floor as he worked on a miniature piano keyboard and try his hardest to watch Sora without him catching him at it. This was because his _looks_ turned too often into _stares_ which turned into _longing glances_ which turned into _plausible deniability going up in flames_ when he had just gotten Sora back.

Sora was executing an _arabesque,_ one leg held aloft behind him as he balanced on the other, arms flowing out of him like water and spine curving gracefully with it, and Riku had been been busy tapping a pencil to the beat in his headphones and had forgotten to catch himself. 

Sora’s eyes suddenly opened and caught his in the mirror, unreadable, but neither one of them looked away, even when the embarrassed blush crawled across Riku’s face. They just _looked_ , caught and held by some invisible, arresting force.

Riku closed the laptop, all pretense forgone, and Sora smile’s smile split his face and chased some of the tension from his shoulders. Riku, like he always did, smiled back.

 _Allegro vivace_ : How they climbed to the roof of Sora’s dance studio that night, how Sora whispered his fears about the future and his mom and his self doubt to him and how Riku finally, _finally_ took his hand, and how Sora turned to face him, and smiled so soft and radiant, bathed in starlight, that Riku heard a melody cresting in his mind before he knew what the feeling was.

He had to fight not to pull away, hands itching for a pencil before he forgot the sound, but Sora had curled his hand under Riku’s windbreaker and was asleep in seconds, exhausted and achy from several hours straight of practice. He wasn’t dressed for the elements, so Riku had opened his jacket to share his warmth until Sora was nearly draped over him, a pile of limbs on the concrete.

He rose and fell with Riku’s breathing, brown hair tickling up under his throat, and Riku’s arm was absolutely asleep, but he was just as busy memorizing that feeling as the melody. 

“It’s okay to watch me, you know,” Sora said to his chest, barely speaking, and Riku started, surprised he was still awake. Sora’s hand tightened where it lay. “I dance better when you’re watching.”

Before Riku could respond, Sora curled closer to him, an arm splayed across his chest with a sigh, and this time was really asleep.

How he drove them home at 4 in the morning, Sora dosing under the old star duvet Riku kept in his car for him, and finally sat down at his desk and tried to write a song _for_ Sora, _about_ Sora--one that contained an entire lifetime of feeling between its bars. It was the most important piece he had ever composed, and the gravity of it and their future bearing down on them made it feel more urgent and essential than anything before it.

He picked up the pencil and closed his eyes.

 

—————-

 

It was the last day of school when they broke into the music room, after hours. Everyone had long since gone home on a half day, if the other seniors had even showed up at all. The lock was older than the school was and really prone to popping open at the slightest breeze, so _really_ \--they couldn’t be blamed.

Riku didn’t care about status, or fame--not like his parents seemed to, once they realized he had talent-- just wanted to keep doing music. Had applied to music college not because he had aims on the stage, but because he really wanted to keep improving, and maybe help some other kids to feel less lonely, someday. The idea hadn’t crystallized more than that.

He got in, though, all the same, on a scholarship. Sora had too—they were going to the same music school, and it had taken many long nights and Sora failing auditions once to get there.

Always guilty of pushing himself too hard, he was gritting his teeth and icing his swollen ankle an hour beforehand and swearing to Riku he could do it, like his body wanted to move even with the disadvantage of sadly mortal ligaments.

He had begged to redo the audition, nearly sobbing with it, and they let him, two weeks later. He had clinched it on the second try, and the way Sora boasted, the whole room had been in tears.

Riku didn’t doubt it, the same thing had happened to him before, watching Sora move.

Sora slammed the doors wide, spinning in a slow arc like he was taking in his kingdom, met Riku’s eyes with a playfulness he had missed in him.

“One more for old time’s sake?” Sora was looking at him and it felt electric, the air between them charged with something like possibility, and it left Riku with the hint of a smile.

“One more fuck you to Mr. Xehanort.”

Mr. Xehanort, his ex-music teacher, had once told Riku that his playing had the air of a primate banging on a window and that he would never amount to anything, musically, if he insisted on trying to make it in piano despite his ‘obvious and unmistakable tonal deficiencies’. Sora had mimicked his tone for weeks, making faces at Riku behind the man’s head as he mouthed the words until he snickered out loud in class and was subsequently an absolute _nightmare_ in detention, because they were sent there together.

He was going to _miss_ this.

Sora snorted, but his smile was sly. “Fuck Xehanort.”

Riku smirked back. “Seriously, fuck him. Should wreck the piano on our way out, just to mess with him.”

He snickered. “I would agree, but I know you could never hurt your baby.” He gave the baby grand a loving pat, like a favorite dog.

“True. It’s not the baby’s fault the owner is a monster.”

He took his spot at the piano bench, and it still felt like home, every time. He found his feet on the pedals, and slid his hands slowly along the cover, trying to commit the feeling to memory, before cracking it open, and he felt Sora’s eyes on him all the while.

“Something on my back?” Riku was flushing, but happy Sora couldn’t see it.

“I never get tired of watching you doing that. You just...look so at home, when you’re sitting there. It looks _right_.”

Riku snorted. “Because it looks stiff and awkward, like I am?”

Sora rolled his eyes, already bending into his stretches with a familiar ease. “No, mister dramatic. It’s because you look _happy.”_  

 _“_ Ah,” he said, but he wondered if that was really just because of the playing.

“So? What’s the final song? The last hurrah? Do we get a happy ending, oh master of stories?”

Riku squinted at him. “And you just called me dramatic?”

Theatrically, Sora bowed, then dropped seamlessly into a forward fold, touching one foot, then the other. He had shed his socks while Riku wasn’t looking. “Where did I say I wasn’t?” came his muffled response. “You’re the one that told me to do theater track.”

As a matter of fact, he had. Someone with as big a personality as Sora was suited for nowhere else. 

“It’s a...new piece I’ve been working on. A surprise.” Riku hoped his tone wasn’t going to betray him before the piece could.

“You know I love surprises,” Sora told him, and his eyes were a challenge, because above all he loved challenges. He went on tip-toe, clasping his hands above his head and _reaching_.

“No offense to the dead guys, but I like your stuff the best,” he said, making a C shape with his body that pulled up his tank top in a way Riku found illegal. He ripped his eyes away.

“Mr. Xehanort is going to show up in your house tonight and throttle you for that.”

 _I like your stuff the best_ was going to be bouncing around his skull for the next several days, Riku was sure of it. 

Sora grinned wickedly as he walked to the center of the room, and something leapt in Riku in response. “I dare him to try. You’re going to be _so_ famous someday he’ll be crowing all about how he made you who you are today in his shity memoir.”

Snorting, he arranged his back on the bench. “Like you won’t? You’re gonna be selling out shows before you’re 25 with the way you dance.”

Sora actually stuck his tongue out at him. “You’ll do it by 21. I bet you a hundred munny.”

“You’re on.” 

Riku rolled his eyes, pointedly ignoring his own pleased blush, and raised his hands. 

He had actually played countless recitals by that time in his life, and the nerves had never gotten to him like they did _then_ , in that shitty, broken down wood paneled music room in his high school that hadn’t been updated since the 70’s, with a makeshift stage they made by pushing the errant chairs to the walls and heaving the piano over to the side of the room.

Sora looked at Riku, soft and slow, and nodded. “Ready when you are.” He brought his arms up into a graceful arc above his head. 

Riku cracked his knuckles, shaking his hands out and trying to curtail the tingling, the tell tale sign of nerves. Inhaled. Exhaled. 

He began to play.

It started soft, and sweet, and slow—like two kids meeting on a playground, and Sora spun like a figure into a music box, quiet and lilting with his head thrown back and his eyes closed, feeling with his whole heart. Riku kept his own open, but his stare was fixed on Sora—had memorized the music long before, had practiced and perfected it beyond measure, but it had never been so important to play it before now, in this very moment.

Into the piece he poured longing, and he music swelled, and Sora swelled with it, grasping at the open air and bending with the sound. The feeling of admiration came next, and longing, and, briefly: the slow shattering of heartbreak, which broke the melody into two, the harmony following after. Sora broke with it, fell gracefully to the floor as if in agony, arched his back like it _hurt_ , because it did, probably, That was how good Sora was.

 _Larghetto, Expressivo_ , it all headed to the conclusion: but first came hurt, and the distance between two hearts, stuck on either side of a divide, each reaching across and longing to be whole. Sora reached out, then, to the invisible horizon—as if trying to grasp someone’s hand, trying and failing, but desperate and hurting and all of that wave rising into a final, hard crescendo.

Sora lept, rolled, and curled into himself on the floor as the song quieted, rolled itself out gently into something like a lullaby, soft and intimate like a whispered conversation, and Riku played slow, legato and gentle and tender like how much he wanted to trail his fingers down Sora’s face, like how much he _loved_ him, through and true and deeply, and let the final sustained note ring out until it disappeared.

He was breathing hard, and his arms were trembling from the terror, this time.

Sora was looking at him from the floor, breathing equally labored, and there were tears in his eyes, and Riku had never felt so immediately transparent in all his life..

“It’s beautiful,” Sora panted, his voice thick. “Probably your best yet. What’s it called?”

“I’m thinking ‘Dearly beloved’.”

Sora hummed. “That’s perfect. It...sounds kinda like a heartbeat.”

Biting his lip, Riku fought to keep his tone even. “It’s...about two hearts that are trying to reach for each other.”

Sora was staring at him, something shining in his eyes like something had just _clicked_ for the first time, and his smile looked pasted on. “A love song, huh? Im happy for you, Riku. Who’s the lucky guy?”

He looked at anything but Sora, which was hard because he felt himself desperately trying to read his reaction. His hands were clammy and he felt the anxiety rising up his spine, trying to stop him from releasing what he had finally decided to. He fisted his hands in his jeans.

“It’s...actually, it’s….about the way you make me feel.”

He _burned_ , felt it crawling up under his hair as his hands rested on the cooling keys, waiting an eternity for his reaction,  because Sora sounded like he had stopped breathing.

It was a terrible, expanding silence.

Silently, gracefully, the other boy walked the few steps to the bench and sat down beside him, so close their bodies were touching and the proximity was _painful_.

“Can I try something?” He asked Riku, his voice carefully neutral, shoulder to shoulder with him.

He wanted to jerk away, run from the room and never write again, probably, to save him from the embarrassment of this moment. But Sora covered his hands with his own before he could, and he was warm and he was playing the second verse of the song, stringing notes together clumsily, but in a way Riku knew how to guide. For the first time in years, they played together.

“It sounds okay alone, but...I think it wants to be played together,” Sora told him, head tilted down and eyes shut like he did when he was feeling out a new song. His eyelashes were dark against his freckled cheeks, this close, and Riku _longed_ to touch him, but Sora still had his hands.

When they got to the middle, Sora had memorized enough that he separated, and they played counter to each other, melody and harmony at once, two heartbeats swelling up and filling the room with the quiet joy of their song.  

The silence felt too empty, after they stopped.

“Come with me,” Sora breathed. He grabbed Riku by the hand, and pulled him up.

“Sora?” Riku asked, but his voice was creased with emotion. He didn’t know if Sora knew he had just confessed, or maybe all of the above at once.

“Trust me,” Sora murmured. He pulled him to the open space in the center of the room, and he noticed it was starting to get dark as they’d neglected to turn any lights on, the shadows obscuring some of the details between them.

He stood facing Riku, linked by their clasped hands. His shoulders rose and fell with an exhale. Even in the dusk light, his eyes shone like an otherworldly presence. “Okay. Dance with me.”

“Sora—you know I’m not good at—“

He was interrupted because Sora had leaned up, on tiptoe since Riku the height advantage, and covered his eyes with his hands, like he had when they were kids, that first time. Despite himself, he wanted to tremble under the touch, certain Sora could feel his rising pulse in his temples.

He heard Sora’s smile, anyway. “You still hear it, right? Our song.” 

“Of course,” Riku admitted. He reached up and gently peeled Sora’s palms away from his face, loosely holding them with his own instead, hesitant and unsure. He didn’t want to hide from this anymore—had no reason _left_ to hide from Sora.

When he had blinked the spots from his vision, Sora gave him a smile so small and genuine, so full of pride, that it was hard to breathe. His eyes crinkled at the corners.

Riku stopped thinking because the air had just been punched from his lungs entirely at the image of the boy he loved arranging his useless, suddenly very clumsy hands on his waist. Despite it, the repeating rhythm of the sound--their sound--persisted in his ears the same way it did that night on the rooftop. He probably wouldn’t ever stop hearing it, now. 

“So dance with me.” Sora rapped his knuckles on chest, once. “Just...lead with this, for once. Okay?”

Riku, Who couldn’t speak, just nodded. His hands were tingling where they touched Sora, warm under his hoody, even, and it was preventing him from stringing thoughts together.

Sora draped his arms around Riku’s neck, like he had always belonged there, and they fit so well Riku wondered why he had never noticed before.

Sora then, and Riku moved with him, and soon they swayed together, a simple dance made no less beautiful by his inexperience. Sora moved them, and Riku did he best to follow, and it was beautiful because _he_ was.

Somehow their foreheads found their way together as they both closed their eyes, and Riku realized Sora was humming the song under his breath, like he always did when he was internalizing a new piece, putting moves to the music, figuring out how new things fit together. He kept reminding himself that this was Sora, because they were so close that he kept wanting lean back and put space between them, their bodies pressed so close felt too intimate, somehow, in a way that made his heart feel heavy with _want_ that he wasn’t sure Sora returned.

Riku was about to open his mouth to speak, maybe to let the confession tumble out, finally, make it so Sora couldn’t possibly misunderstand in his _oblivious_ way, when Sora beat him to it.

“I love you too, Riku. I think I always have.”

Gentle as breathing, then, he entwined their hands, and opened his beautiful, arresting blue eyes so Riku could see the truth reflected back at him. _Twelve years of truths._

He had always had trouble looking Sora in the eyes when he was saying something true, so Sora’s hand brushed its way up his cheek and moved his bangs out of his eyes, encouraging him to _see_.

This time Riku was the one crying, definitely ugly and wracking and so violently he was hiding his face in Sora’s neck because it hurt too much not to, and Sora was craning up around his broad shoulders to try and enfold all of him in his grasp as Riku tried to cobble together words to explain how much he felt, but he didn’t need to, because Sora had _danced_ it, Sora _knew_. 

“I’m glad you told me.”

Riku nodded into his neck, sure he was soaking Sora’s shirt, grasping so tightly he was squeezing, but not _caring_ because his heart was floating six inches above his body, helium and air rising off into the sky, entire chest bursting into fireworks or something like it when Sora pulled back to look at him.

“Sorry,” Riku rasped, but Sora had already cupped his cheek and he was _warm_ and _right_ and he couldn’t help but lean into it his hand, certain a stupid, slow smile was spreading across his face, because he couldn’t help mirroring him. 

“You’re beautiful,” Sora murmured, eyes fixing on his lips, and brought his face up to his, already tilting his head, eyes closed even though he was grinning, wide and radiant.

Finally, _finally_ , Riku met him halfway, his grin a perfect mirror image.

 

—————-

 

 _Allegro con Amore_ : the feeling of knowing that Sora loved him back. 

**Author's Note:**

> I used a BUNCH of tempo markings (as used in music) as section headers in this fic, so here they are with translations, in order, if you were curious.
> 
> Larghissimo - As slow as possible  
> Adagio - In a slow manner  
> Andante - Moderately Slow, Medium  
> Vivace - Quick and Lively, Bright  
> Tremelo isn't actually a tempo, it's a trembling effect in music, but it was too good, SO  
> Allegreto - Fairly Quick  
> Precipitando - Moving faster, speeding up, a tempo change  
> A Tempo - Resuming the speed obtained preceding a slow down or speed up  
> Allegro - Fast, quickly, and bright  
> Allegro con Amore - Fast, quickly, and with a feeling of love
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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